The Ducks received the gift of an early power play Monday night at the Honda Center. Nazem Kadri of the Toronto Maple Leafs hooked Teemu Selanne of Anaheim only 1 minute, 30 seconds into the game, committing an unnecessary infraction well away from his own net.

Instead of making the Maple Leafs pay, instead of capitalizing on an early mistake by the opposition, the Ducks failed to click on the power play and, what was worse, they lost whatever early momentum they might have generated.

The game turned away from the Ducks and toward the Maple Leafs later during the pivotal first period, with Tyler Bozak and Phil Kessel scoring goals that propelled Toronto to a 3-1 victory in coach Randy Carlyle’s return to the Honda Center.

Toronto goaltender Jonathan Bernier stopped all but Corey Perry’s second-period shot off a goalmouth scramble among the 44 shots the Ducks fired at him in his first game in Southern California since the Kings traded him to the Maple Leafs last summer.

“When a goalie is sharp and you don’t create traffic in front of the net, where he can’t see the pucks coming, you’re not going to score,” Ducks coach Bruce Boudreau said. “He was seeing everything. He was stopping everything.”

Bernier faced nearly unrelenting pressure after the opening period. The Ducks outshot the Maple Leafs by a whopping 35-12 after the first period. They also recorded the final 11 shots and the last seven scoring chances of the second period.

“Tired,” Bernier said when asked how he felt after the Ducks’ second-period onslaught. “This building was really hot tonight. But we survived and when we came back after the second, that’s when we said to ourselves, ‘We weathered the storm and we’ve got to come out hard in the third.’”

When the Ducks couldn’t score on the power play, they suffered letdowns, according to team captain Ryan Getzlaf. They misfired on four power-play opportunities against the Maple Leafs, including two in the third period when they tried to rally from a 3-1 deficit.

“We’ve got to gain momentum from power plays whether we score or not,” Getzlaf said. “We’ve got to use them to our advantage. We can’t let not scoring bring us down all the time. We get down every time we don’t score on the power play.

“Instead of using the momentum we create during the power play, we feel if we don’t score we kill it all. That can’t be the case in our group. We’re too good. We have too much skill out there to feel that kind of pressure on the backs of everybody.”

The Ducks are in a 1-for-19 power-play drought since returning from the Olympic break. It’s something they’ll need to correct immediately. They have lost their lead in the NHL’s overall standings to the St. Louis Blues and the San Jose Sharks are only four points behind the Pacific Division.

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“The last three games I thought we’ve done a great job,” Getzlaf said. “We’ve worked hard, gotten pucks back after shots. We’ve shot pucks. They’re just not going in. I’m not accepting that.

“Those are the things we have to focus on as a group. We need to support each other through these things.”